Episode 883 - 2009 Prediction Show
The JaMoTo Analysts throw down a healthy serving of tech predictions for the new year. Are you ready to rumble? Tom Merritt *One mass-media company will push out an Internet-only or Internet-primary hit. *GPS is slowly going to disappear into the gadgets around us. *There will be some sort of Armageddon security breach that will force people to come to the table and changing fundamental Internet protocols. *Android will outsell iPhone. *Yahoo! will finally be purchased by someone. *By the end of 2009, a mind control game peripheral will be available to the public. *Twitter will get as big as Facebook *Google will buy a content company (like a movie studio or broadcast network). *There will be "bandwidth riots" -- people will try to do more and more with their connection, and the ISPs will try to crack down more and more. *The DTV transition will mostly go off without a hitch; it will be a non-event. *We will get our first real looks at the next generation of consoles -- two of the three game companies will have prototypes to show off. *Scientists will find evidence of some kind of life in the solar system outside of Earth. Molly Wood *There will be no copy/paste for the iPhone in 2009. *Molly will buy an Android phone by the end of the year. They will be cool enough, and the Apple App Store hegemony will frustrate her enough. *Steve Jobs will leave his current role at Apple this year -- soon this year. *The usefulness and low price of Netbooks are going to be severely compromised by feature creep. Therefore, they will get more expensive and bigger. *This will be the year that Yahoo! files for bankruptcy. *A major national newspaper -- possibly the LA Times -- will go online only, starting the death march for newspapers. *Google will buy Twitter. *Significant numbers of Americans will dump cable for Internet-only television; this will lead to packaged pricing from cable/satellite companies that comes close to a-la-carte television. *The semantic web will enable whole roll-your-own syndication opportunities in podcast feeds based on tagging (subscriptions to any podcast anywhere based on topic will be possible). *Netbooks and other "gateways to the cloud" will be pitched as terminal computers. *Alien life (protozoa-level) will be discovered on Venus. Jason Howell *The cut and paste on the iPhone will finally happen. *A major Mac exploit scare will happen (an actual widespread virus, for example). *Netbook sales will double. *The Large Hadron Collider will not go online. *iTunes will finally get an eBook section in its store, and there will be a new iPhone firmware version with eBook support. *Microsoft will attempt to purchase a fledgling cell phone manufacturer, possibly in an attempt to bolster and control Windows Mobile on its devices, and compete with Apple in the phone space. *Blu-Ray will start to gain market share from DVD, prices on all the hardware will dip low enough, and enough people will purchase new HDTVs (due to DTV switchover confusion), that suddenly, "The Power of Blu-Ray will compel you!" *A fancy Android phone will a solar panel will be announced. *A cloud service will be proven to have taken a considerable -- or reasonable -- chunk out of the sales of an established software application, prompting calls such as, "Is this the beginning of the end of software as we know it?" *iTunes will go DRM-free. *No evidence of life outside of Earth will be discovered. See also *2009 Listener Predictions Thread *Predictions 883